Philosophy 290-1

High-level sciences like biology and economics study patterns in the arrangement of high-level properties, such as the distributions of genotypes in a population of organisms, or the prices of a range of commodities. But in a certain sense, patterns of properties are cheap: we can define up countless other high-level miscellany, such as the disjunctive property of being a boom economy or a butterfly. Is there anything special about the ones we actually focus on? In what sense is there anything other than the patterns of properties studied in fundamental physics? To examine this question we will discuss a range of literature from meta-metaphysics, philosophy of science, and cognitive science.